ART MOVEMENTS: ART DECO PART 1

I wanted to continue studying Struzan, but this time I thought I would break more ground approaching it from the perspective of art movements. Looking at his work gave the feeling of early 20th century art feelings, but I couldn’t place why. Drew went through an early Art Nouveau phase in his work (I’ll have to study that style next to see what motifs he carried on in his work.) But once I started looking at Art Deco, it clicked! “This is Struzan.”, I thought.

LINEAR FLARE

Gerda Wegener’s “A Summer Day” from 1927 perfectly captured the style I was looking for - the motif Struzan uses for light effects: successive light rays that almost “self shadow” each other. Like each layer has a shadow darkening the bottom layer and removing opacity.

Examples from Drew Struzan below:

CIRCULAR FLARE

So I started digging deeper and noticed more and more Art Deco elements that showed up in Struzan’s work.

The art below from Aaron Douglas and William P. Welsh are somewhat close. Struzan uses concentric circles around light sources to be lens flares, but this isn’t quite Struzan’s look.

William P. Welsh’s poster below from 1935 was exactly what I was looking for. It had successive self-shadowing light rays with concentric circles:

Below are Struzan’s work that use this motif:

In Attack of the Clones, Struzan doesn’t fully use this light motif, but it can be seen in the lower, larger lens flare in the second ring of the flare.